Sherrilyn Ifill walks into court with history behind her as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund. It’s the legal arm of the civil rights movement, and Sherrilyn is in its vanguard. Her hometown is Jamaica, Queens, a neighborhood in New York City where she grew up in the 1960s and '70s. That’s what Kevin Burke explores with her in this conversation, starting with the first question Sherrilyn asks whenever she takes on a new legal case: “Tell me about the history of this place.” That’s because she knows every town has one: the layers of time, buried and built over, that reveal why things are the way they are, from the bulldozing of Black neighborhoods to make way for highways to brutal acts of violence like lynchings, erased from the public square and, over time, memory. Sherrilyn wants us to see these scars of history all around us and how they impact the struggle for equal justice in America. She’s compared this process of discovery to swallowing the red pill in the sci-fi action film, The Matrix. Once you see the past in the present, you can’t unsee it. What is the connection between Sherrilyn’s civil rights work and her powerful personal story and all she experienced in her New York?

Your Hometown is a show where the local is the epic. Visit yourhometown.org to subscribe to the podcast and our various social media channels.

Our co-presenter this season is the Museum of the City of New York. For more, including information on live events, check out our NYC series page at mcny.org/yourhometown-podcast.

Show Notes

Music

Judy Garland – “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (1944)

The Freedom Singers -- “We Shall Not Be Moved at the March on Washington” (1963)

The O’Jays -- “Use Ta Be My Girl” (1978)

Choir of Zion Methodist Church -- “Jesus Leads Me All the Way” (1970)

James Brown -- “Lost Someone” Live at the Apollo theater (1972)

The Human Condition with Beverly Grant -- “Clifford Grover” (1974)

Archival

Martin Luther King Jr. Funeral Services

1978-Boston Massacre, Game 2 (WPIX-TV Audio)

The Huntley-Brinkley Report, July 31, 1970

May 17, 1973: Televised Watergate Hearings Begin

Barbara Jordan Impeachment Speech

Exclusive: Riots that followed a Queens police shooting, 40 years later

The Matrix (1999)

Rosedale: The Way It Is (1976)

Illustration

Nick Gregg

Poem

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Part 52, Leaves of Grass (1855)

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter